Variational quantum eigensolver ansätze hold considerable promise for ground-state energy calculations on near-term quantum hardware, yet most promising ansatz designs currently strongly depend on how well the molecular orbital basis captures the electronic correlation of the system. Computing optimized orbital coefficients via classical routines is computationally expensive and must be performed independently for each molecular geometry -- a bottleneck that limits scalability across chemical space. We present a graph neural network framework that predicts optimized orbital coefficients directly from molecular geometry and pair-wise bonding structure. Trained on hydrogenic systems of modest size (
H4 and
H6) across tens of thousands of geometries, our model transfers to larger, unseen systems (
H8,
H10 and
H12) without retraining -- demonstrating strong out-of-distribution generalization with respect to system size. When evaluating on structured and random configurations, and comparing against energies obtained with full classical optimization, our model reaches mean absolute energy errors
O(102) and
O(10) milli-Hartrees, respectively. Beyond energy estimation, the predicted orbitals serve as high-quality warm-start initializations that substantially reduce optimizer iterations to ground-state energy convergence. These results establish graph neural networks as an effective and scalable strategy for accelerating orbital optimization in hybrid quantum-classical workflows, directly reducing the classical pre-processing overhead that currently limits the practical deployment of variational quantum eigensolver on near-term quantum hardware.
Machine learning has made significant contributions to the fields of chemistry and materials science, enabling the exploration of vast chemical space through large-scale quantum chemical calculations. These models provide fast and accurate predictions of atomistic chemical properties, but they have limitations when it comes to capturing the electronic degrees of freedom of a molecule. This restricts their application in reactive chemistry and chemical analysis. To address this limitation, we introduce a deep learning framework that predicts the quantum mechanical wavefunction of a molecule in a local basis of atomic orbitals. The wavefunction serves as a foundational representation from which all other ground-state properties can be derived. Our approach maintains complete access to the electronic structure through the wavefunction, while achieving computational efficiency comparable to force-field methods. Moreover, the framework captures quantum mechanics in a form that can be analytically differentiated, allowing for efficient optimization and exploration of chemical systems. We demonstrate the potential of our approach through several examples. By leveraging the predicted wavefunction, we showcase the ability to perform inverse design of molecular structures to target specific electronic property optimizations. This opens exciting avenues for tailoring molecular structures to achieve desired electronic characteristics. Additionally, our framework paves the way for enhanced synergy between machine learning and quantum chemistry, enabling more comprehensive investigations into complex chemical systems.
To accelerate the process of materials design, materials science has increasingly used data driven techniques to extract information from collected data. Specially, machine learning (ML) algorithms, which span the ML discipline, have demonstrated ability to predict various properties of materials with the level of accuracy similar to explicit calculation of quantum mechanical theories, but with significantly reduced run time and computational resources. Within ML, graph neural networks have emerged as an important algorithm within the field of machine learning, since they are capable of predicting accurately a wide range of important physical, chemical and electronic properties due to their higher learning ability based on the graph representation of material and molecular descriptors through the aggregation of information embedded within the graph. In parallel with the development of state of the art classical machine learning applications, the fusion of quantum computing and machine learning have created a new paradigm where classical machine learning model can be augmented with quantum layers which are able to encode high dimensional data more efficiently. Leveraging the structure of existing algorithms, we developed a unique and novel gradient free hybrid quantum classical convoluted graph neural network (HyQCGNN) to predict formation energies of perovskite materials. The performance of our hybrid statistical model is competitive with the results obtained purely from a classical convoluted graph neural network, and other classical machine learning algorithms, such as XGBoost. Consequently, our study suggests a new pathway to explore how quantum feature encoding and parametric quantum circuits can yield drastic improvements of complex ML algorithm like graph neural network.
Quantum chemistry models atoms and molecules using quantum mechanics, with the electronic structure problem at its core. This problem, which determines the energy and properties of electrons in a molecule, is exponentially hard to solve exactly on classical computers. To approximate solutions, effective models introduce layers of simplifications. However, these approximations can fail for strongly correlated systems, necessitating alternative approaches. Quantum computers, capable of processing quantum information natively, offer a promising path to simulate molecular systems beyond classical reach, with potential applications in catalysis, materials science, and photochemistry. Despite rapid advancements in quantum hardware, practical quantum computations remain challenging due to limited resources. This thesis optimizes quantum resource usage in computational chemistry, introducing novel embedding techniques and exploring applications beyond ground-state energies. Chapter 1 establishes the foundation by reviewing quantum chemistry methods, from Hartree-Fock and Density Functional Theory (DFT) to active space approaches. It also provides an introduction to quantum computing for chemistry, focusing on near-term algorithms. The following chapters present novel methods aimed at reducing quantum resource requirements and tackling problems classical methods struggle with. Chapter 2 introduces a technique to reduce the
λ-norm of the electronic structure Hamiltonian, a key measure of quantum resource demand. By transforming molecular orbitals, this method enhances sampling efficiency in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms and reduces runtime in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing (FTQC). Localized orbitals outperform canonical ones, and an orbital-optimization scheme is proposed to minimize the
λ-norm. Benchmarks on hydrogen chains, FeMoco, and Ruthenium complexes demonstrate its effectiveness. Chapter 3 presents the FragPT2 framework for simulating large systems with multiple interacting fragments. This method embeds each fragment in the mean field of others and applies multi-reference perturbation theory to capture inter-fragment correlations such as dispersion and charge transfer efficiently. The approach reduces computational overhead and enables scalable simulations, as shown in applications to \ce{N2} dimers, aromatic dimers, and butadiene. Chapter 4 focuses on photochemical systems, where multiple electronic states must be treated equally. The state-averaged orbital-optimized variational quantum eigensolver (SAOOVQE) is extended with analytical energy gradients and non-adiabatic couplings, enabling geometry optimizations and simulations of non-adiabatic dynamics on quantum hardware. This is demonstrated by locating the conical intersection in formaldimine, highlighting SAOOVQE’s potential for studying photoisomerization in biomolecules. Building on this, Chapter 5 develops a quantum algorithm to detect conical intersections, where the Born-Oppenheimer approximation breaks down. These intersections are characterized by a discrete Berry phase (0 or
π), representing their topological nature. The algorithm extracts this phase as a single bit of information, ensuring resilience to noise. Analytical proof and numerical validation using a toy molecular model illustrate its effectiveness for studying light-perception biochemistry and related photochemical processes. Finally, Chapter 6 explores machine learning density functionals trained on noisy quantum data. While DFT is computationally efficient, its accuracy depends on approximated exchange-correlation functionals. This work proposes a neural network-based approach to learn the exact functional from quantum data, showing that training on noisy outputs from NISQ devices can mitigate sampling errors. Applications to the Fermi-Hubbard model and other systems demonstrate its potential to generalize and provide accurate results under noise. This thesis advances quantum computational chemistry by optimizing quantum resource usage, developing new embedding strategies, and expanding the scope of quantum simulations beyond ground-state properties. These contributions pave the way for practical quantum algorithms that could revolutionize molecular simulations in the near future.
Quantum chemistry provides a target for quantum simulation of considerable scientific interest and industrial importance. The majority of algorithms to date have been based on a second-quantized representation of the electronic structure Hamiltonian - necessitating qubit requirements that scale linearly with the number of orbitals. The scaling of the number of gates for such methods, while polynomial, presents some serious experimental challenges. However, because the number of electrons is a good quantum number for the electronic structure problem it is unnecessary to store the full Fock space of the orbitals. Representation of the wave function in a basis of Slater determinants for fixed electron number suffices. However, to date techniques for the quantum simulation of the Hamiltonian represented in this basis - the CI-matrix - have been lacking. We show how to apply techniques developed for the simulation of sparse Hamiltonians to the CI-matrix. We prove a number of results exploiting the structure of the CI-matrix, arising from the Slater rules which define it, to improve the application of sparse Hamiltonian simulation techniques in this case. We show that it is possible to use the minimal number of qubits to represent the wavefunction, and that these methods can offer improved scaling in the number of gates required in the limit of fixed electron number and increasing basis set size relevant for high-accuracy calculations. We hope these results open the door to further investigation of sparse Hamiltonian simulation techniques in the context of the quantum simulation of quantum chemistry.
Quantum computation of the energy of molecules and materials is one of the most promising applications of fault-tolerant quantum computers. Practical applications require development of quantum algorithms with reduced resource requirements. Previous work has mainly focused on quantum algorithms where the Hamiltonian is represented in second quantization with compact basis sets while existing methods in first quantization are limited to a grid-based basis. In this work, we present a new method to solve the generic ground-state chemistry problem in first quantization using any basis set. We achieve asymptotic speedup in Toffoli count for molecular orbitals, and orders of magnitude improvement using dual plane waves as compared to the second quantization counterparts. In some instances, our approach provides similar or even lower resources compared to previous first quantization plane wave algorithms that, unlike our approach, avoids the loading of the classical data. The developed methodology can be applied to variety of applications, where the matrix elements of a first quantized Hamiltonian lack simple circuit representation.